SYRIA: Al Jazeera journalist missing since Friday
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Al Jazeera reports that one of its journalists has been missing in Syria since she arrived Friday to cover the unrest in the country.
The news network said Monday that it has had no contact with Dorothy Parvaz since she disembarked from a Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Damascus.
“We are concerned for Dorothy’s safety and wellbeing,” Al Jazeera said in a statement. “We are requesting full cooperation from the Syrian authorities to determine how she was processed at the airport and what her current location is. We want her returned to us immediately.”
Parvaz, 39, is an American, Canadian and Iranian citizen who recently reported on the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Before joining Al Jazeera in 2010, she worked as a columnist and feature writer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
As many as a couple dozen journalists have been detained in Syria, where security forces have unleashed a violent crackdown against anti-government protests that began in March.
‘It seems as if the government now considers the journalists as much of a problem as the actual social unrest,’ Mohamed Abdel Dayem, Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, told Al Jazeera.
— Alexandra Zavis
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